The Holocaust

Everyone should refer to it as the Shoah, not the Holocaust.

The word holocaust was originally proposed by Elie Wiesel. The original Hebrew word for a burnt offering sacrifice to God was ola. In the Septuagint, holokauston.

After Christians began to observe that the Jews had mirrored Jesus in their long via dolorosa across the centuries to crucifixion in the Holocaust, a reflection in their own bodies of the Final Sacrifice that God wanted, prominent Jews quickly debated changing to the word shoah, “disaster,” from Is 47:11 “But evil shall come upon you, for which you cannot atone; disaster shall fall upon you, which you will not be able to expiate; and ruin shall come on you suddenly, of which you know nothing.”

In the Hebrew language, shoah is related to lashav, “in vain.” Changing the name from Elie Wiesel’s ola to shoah removes the reflection of Jesus’ Final Sacrifice that Christians see in it, making it all in vain, reminding us of the Book of Ecclesiastes, written by the son of David, Eccles 1:1 probably Solomon. In it he takes the role of Kohelet, usually translated as the Preacher or Teacher. Kohelet is a mirror opposite of Rabbi Yeshua. He is the son of David and the Teacher, but his message is hakol hevel, all is in vain. Hevel is vapor, nothing. Rabbi Yeshua teaches that earthly life is supremely important because it is our preparation for our eternal life.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum still use holocaust.

The Holocaust is ontologically Jewish. We know that three million Polish Catholics and two million others were killed in the camps along with six million Jews, but their deaths were different because Hitler was not trying to annihilate them as peoples. Christians should not integrate the Holocaust into their own faith tradition.

Catholics seek to respect Jewish sensitivity but simply are not going to dismiss three million of their own and two million others killed in the Holocaust.

Simon Wiesenthal, the world’s foremost Nazi hunter, always connected the Holocaust to human rights for all people and spoke of eleven million victims. He knew that those who ask for sensitivity must also give sensitivity.

The Catholic Church has done much to accommodate Jewish concerns. The Vatican has set a positive tone by publishing a number of documents. Jews have acknowledged that Jewish-Catholic relations are dramatically better than they were before Vatican II, but we still hear complaints about the canonizations of St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Edith Stein, the beatification of Pope Pius IX, the veneration of Pope Pius XII, etc. Sometimes, the language becomes quite intense, for example when an essay on the web site of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks of the “kidnapping of the Shoah.”

Before the Holocaust, the Good Friday liturgy was always prayed in Latin, which distinguished between fideles, believers, perfideles, half-believers, and infideles, non-believers. Most Jews would agree that from a Catholic perspective they are half-believers, believers in the Mosaic Covenant but not the Christian Covenant. However, because the English word perfidious had taken on a connotation the Church never intended, Pope John XXIII in 1958 changed it in the missals to unfaithful Jews, meaning unfaithful to the Christian Covenant, the Catholic reference standard. Pope John XXIII later completely suppressed the term perfideles, avoiding characterization of the Jews and instead simply praying for their conversion. Pope Paul VI, consistent with Nostra Aetate’s mandate to present Judaism in a positive light, rewrote the prayer to pray simply that the Jewish people remain faithful to the Old Covenant.

However, the Jewish side has continued for more than 1,900 years to pray the shmone esre (“eighteen benedictions”), also called the amidah (“standing”), with its “nineteenth benediction,” the birkat ha minim, the prayer against Christian “heretics.” Jews pray it not once a year, as Catholics do the Good Friday liturgy, but three times a day, and regard it as one of their two most prominent prayers (the other is the shma).

May apostates have no hope and the kingdom of impertinence be uprooted in our day. May the Christians and heretics disappear in the twinkling of an eye. May they be removed from the book of the living and not be inscribed among the just. Bless you, Lord, you who cast down the proud.

Jews say the birkat ha minim, now twelfth in the nineteen prayer sequence, was added because Jewish converts to Christianity were informing on Jews, although by about 80 AD, when Rabbi Gamaliel II (grandson of the rabbi who taught St. Paul) added it, the Roman emperors were severely persecuting Christians, who for that reason had no desire whatever for contact with Roman officials. Catholics say it was because the Jewish Christians refused to leave the synagogues. Either way, this “nineteenth benediction” among the “eighteen benedictions” has remained a part of the Jewish liturgy for more than nineteen centuries, long after any need for it had passed. In its current form the word nozrim, Nazarenes (Christians), is no longer mentioned, but it continues to echo in the birkat ha minim. Catholics know who the minim, heretics, are.

Many Catholics observe that the Jewish nation’s Abrahamic election was deeply connected with anticipation of the Messiah. Gen 14:18 “And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!’”

The prophet Zechariah had foretold that the Messiah would be a priest in the line of Melchizedek. Zech 9:9 “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.” Why would Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a donkey? Most people walked; riding suggested that He came as a king. A rider on a horse was prepared for war. Arrival on a donkey was humble, a message of peace. The Jews knew that Balaam’s ass responded peacefully even after Balaam hit her three times with his staff. Num 22:28 “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times …” Jesus’ arrival in “Jerusalem” as the “king of peace,” confirmed for Catholics that He was a priest forever in the line of Melchizedek.

God made a covenant, a b’rit, with Abraham about 1900 BC. Gen 17:7 “I will establish My covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. And I will give to you, and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” Particularly after Moses, the Jewish nation was to be a living witness to God, a light to the nations. Is 49:6 “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” But the Jewish nation chose not to witness to Jesus as God’s Messiah. St. Paul observed, Rom 11:28 “As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

The eternal election means that the Jewish nation was responsible for proclaiming God, including His Messiah. What happens when God’s Messiah comes, and the people with an eternal election choose not to witness? Christians observe that, by not witnessing to Jesus in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, the Jewish nation had to witness to Him in His crucified body. Marc Chagall, the great Russian Jewish artist, painted White Crucifixion and Exodus, images of Judaism itself on the Cross. Christians observe that Jews across the centuries have reflected the image of Jesus. They have walked a long via crucis, beaten, mocked and derided. Mystically speaking, the Jews were crucified at Auschwitz and three years later rose from the dead in the nation Israel.

Christians see considerable evidence for this theology. During the preceding two thousand years persecuted Jews had been allowed to save their lives by renouncing Judaism. When they boldly chose to affirm their faith even at the point of death they sanctified God’s name and gained eternal life through martyrdom. Jesus said, Mt 10:39 “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” But the Nazi state was relentless in its racial classifications. For the first time, individual Jews had no opportunity for personal martyrdom. The Jewish nation gained martyrdom as a whole.

There was more striking evidence. During the Holocaust, American Jews were most concerned with the conflict between the Zionist rabbinate led by Rabbi Stephen Wise and Rabbi Hillel Silver, and the anti-Zionist rabbinate led by the American Council for Judaism. Thomas A. Kolsky, in Jews Against Zionism, pp. 199-200, wrote:

One aspect of the confrontation between the American Zionists and the Council is most troubling. Neither of the two antagonists made serious efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. That was an inexcusable failure. Rather than suspend their ideological war and join in a common endeavor to save Jewish lives during a time of crisis, both groups were preoccupied with plans for the postwar period. The American Council for Judaism is-sued impressive statements about the virtues of emancipation and free immigration after the war as the best way to solve the problem of Jewish suffering. The Zionists, who campaigned steadfastly during the war to con-vert Americans to their program, assigned a much higher priority to promoting support for Jewish statehood than to rescuing Jews.

Certainly some American Jews spoke out against the Holocaust, but the Jewish nation as a whole did not rise up and speak out against this Holocaust in proportion to its importance. Even after December 18, 1942, when the eleven allied nations positively confirmed its existence, The New York Times, a Jewish-owned newspaper in the United States’ most Jewish city, gave the Holocaust very little coverage. This was remarkable in view of Isaiah’s prophecy, Is 53:7 “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.”

If one starts where Christians start, with the assumption that Jesus of Nazareth was truly God’s Messiah, then all of this is legitimate as speculative theology. Jews are of course free to disagree with this perspective, but they simply cannot declare an event of Biblical proportions in our own time off-limits for Christian theological speculation.